


you can tell me when it’s alright for me to come out

by zenstrike



Series: you’re lucky that’s what i like [29]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Domestic Fluff, Established Relationship, M/M, Uni is Suffering, silliness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-03
Updated: 2019-02-03
Packaged: 2019-10-21 09:21:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,229
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17640068
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zenstrike/pseuds/zenstrike
Summary: Keith digs a hole. Lance pulls him back out.





	you can tell me when it’s alright for me to come out

**Author's Note:**

> the care and keeping of keith: a manifesto, by lance.
> 
> klance, late in their third year. keith is working on the proposal for his honors project. :’)
> 
> written for anon and based on the soft sentence starter (yeah i’m still working on those): [puts feet on the other’s lap].

The door opened and Keith had enough of his brain left to drag his books and papers from the chair next to him, and just enough strength left in his body to shove them behind his laptop. They toppled over. His glasses slid a little down his nose. A loose sheet of paper, covered in his frantic red ink scribbles, fluttered to the floor and slid along to rest in front of one of the cupboards under their kitchen sink.

Keith ignored it.

He straightened his glasses.

They slid back down.

The cursor blinked at him, partway through an unfinished sentence that was mostly—honestly, truly, fundamentally—bullshit.

Lance was loud at the door: kicking off his shoes, dumping his backpack against the floor, humming intermittently to himself. The kitchen—the apartment—seemed immediately brighter with him home. Keith felt a little ache in his chest, just above his ribs, and imagined slamming his laptop shut and stumbling into the hall and peppering Lance with kisses until they fell over and Lance’s laughter filled his ears and his mushy, stupid, tired brain.

He forced himself to type: “and.”

He deleted it.

It helped. He was able to hunch a little more over his keyboard and lean a little closer to his screen and try to drag some sense out of his brain and ignore Lance.

“My life is pain and suffering,” Keith typed. He deleted it. Tap-tap-tap at the delete button.

“Having fun?” Lance said, coming up behind him.

Keith grunted.

His half-formed thought returned—a brief, delicious  _ a-ha _ —and he kept typing. His fingers kind of ached but there was something like focus crowding at the edges of his vision. He shoved his glasses back up his nose and they stayed.

Tap-tap-tap.

“Have you been sitting here all day?”

Keith grunted again.

“Have you eaten?”

“Yeah.”

“Have you eaten something other than instant noodles?”

Food was food.

Keith shrugged.

Lance dropped into the emptied seat with a sigh and a huff.

_ How was your day, sweetheart _ ? Keith could say, and then what was left of his concentration would fly out the window.

“You look crazy,” Lance said.

Keith was a little crazy. He should have majored in—basket weaving.

Honors degree, Adam had said. Grad school, Adam had said.

Keith tapped a little harder at his keyboard. He kept going with his left hand and felt for his notes to his right.

He was just about to tear his eyes from his screen and scan his scrawled outline, his notes littered with idle doodles of Red and hearts from Lance and smiling suns from Hunk, when Lance swung his legs up and plopped his feet in Keith’s lap.

Keith leaned back, dragging his hands away from his laptop and notes and the table. He looked down at Lance’s wiggling, socked toes.

“Those are my socks,” Keith said.

“Are they?” Lance sighed.

“I’m almost done,” Keith said to Lance’s feet. Lance wiggled his toes some more. “If I get this done today—”

“No one’s stopping you,” Lance said. “Except me.”

Keith looked at him, frowning, and watched Lance tug open the canvas tote on his lap—one of their shopping bags, usually balled up and shoved to the bottom of one of their backpacks or sitting in a clump in their trunk.

The bag’s button came undone with a pop. Lance hummed.

“Lance,” Keith said, trying for annoyed and coming out vaguely wheezey.

Lance pulled out a slim bottle of wine that Keith knew for a fact tasted like grape juice. He set it on the table with a muted thunk.

“Lance,” Keith said again.

Next came an enormous bag of sour gummies. A bag of kiwis. One apple pear. A bag of cheetos. A jar of the nice pasta sauce. A pack of sausages.

“Lance.”

“Keith,” Lance said with a roll of his eyes.

Dark chocolate. Cheese strings. A bag of tortellini.

“Take a break,” Lance said, slumping back against the chair and frowning back at Keith.

“Can’t,” Keith managed.

“”course you can.”

“I need—”

“You  _ need _ ,” Lance said, waving a hand in a vague and slightly dizzying gesture. “To spend some time with me. Look! All your favourite goodies. Plus—me.”

Keith blinked once, twice, three times. And then shook his head tapped at the table, just shy of his laptop. “I’m almost done.”

“You were done last week,” Lance huffed. “You were done  _ yesterday _ . You’re slipping down a hole, Keith.”

His would-be supervisor had said something similar on Monday while clutching the latest draft of Keith’s proposal.

“This isn’t the be-all, end-all,” she had muttered, sliding the sheet onto her desk while Keith scowled in her doorway. “All you want to do is give the department an idea of what you might work on. Think about just letting the proposal itself—be.”

Letting it  _ be _ ?

Letting it— _ be? _

What the hell did that even mean?

“You learned this from Adam,” Shiro had said.

“Not helpful.”

“Step away from it, Keith. Get some distance. Take a nap. What does Lance say?”

“Take a break,” Lance said, waving his hand to catch Keith’s attention again. “Come on, man, work with me.”

Keith sputtered, just a little. “Man,” he echoed, slapping uselessly at his glasses. “Did you really just call me, your partner—”

“Yeah, yeah.” Lance heaved a huge, kitchen-shaking sigh and pulled his feet from Keith’s lap. He leaned over, slow, and closed Keith’s laptop.

Click.

Keith dropped his hands to his lap. His ears popped. And, slowly, he started to breathe.

“I think I need a break,” he said.

“Good idea,” Lance said. “How about you decompress or whatever for a minute, and I’ll cut up the non-pear for you?”

Keith gaped at him.

“Are you alive?” Lance said, getting to his feet with a smile. “Are you breathing?”

Yes, Keith thought.

“Good,” Lance said, like he could read Keith’s mind.

And maybe he could. 

“We’re just going to relax, ‘kay?” He leaned down and pecked a kiss to Keith’s forehead. “Watch a movie. Take a bath.”

“What?” Keith said.

“I’ll wash your hair,” Lance said, sounding like he’d found some semblance of authority under their sink. “And tell you how smart you are.”

“What?” Keith said again, and then shook his head. He started to stand. “No—no. I can slice my own damn—”

“Sit down, you nerd,” Lance muttered, more affectionately than Keith thought was entirely appropriate. “Let me take care of you.”

“Did Shiro call you?” Keith said, sinking back into his seat and feeling the sedentary ache in his knees. 

“Oh, Keith,” Lance said softly and kissed him again.

 

(Keith nibbled on his apple pear and watched Lance tidy up his notes and listened to Lance tell him about his day. He wondered, briefly, when Lance had figured out how to handle him.

He suffocated the resistance bubbling up in his belly.

He dragged his laptop and some of his books to their bedroom and face-planted on their bed. Lance woke him, later, guiding him to the living room and the comfort of their couch with a plate of pasta.

Keith started to doze again, slumped against Lance. “I got you,” Lance said in his ear, soft and warm. He fell into a comforting dream, with one of Lance’s hands in his hair and Lance’s arms and legs and wound tight around him.)

**Author's Note:**

> title comes from hard times by paramore


End file.
